Another cabinet appointment today? Does Donald Trump even pretend to vet any of these folks? Beats me. But yes, there's a third appointee today: Linda McMahon, of professional wrestling fame, will head up the Small Business Administration. (This is a cabinet-level post, so it goes on the list.) McMahon and her husband founded the WWE empire and are worth over $1 billion, so that's officially the third billionaire in his cabinet. Plus there's Trump himself, of course, so that's four. That's 0.7 percent of all the billionaires in the country—so far.

Among other things, the McMahons have nearly single-handedly funded the Trump Foundation since 2007. Earlier this year they gave $6 million to Trump's campaign. Normally this gets you an ambassadorship to, say, Sweden, but the McMahons are longtime pals, so Linda gets a spot in the cabinet instead. The official excuse is that she helped build the WWE from a small business into an empire, so she knows just what small businesses need. Works for me.

The Shorenstein Center has published its analysis of 2016 election coverage, and the main takeaway is that it was very, very negative—but not uniformly negative. For most of the campaign, Donald Trump's coverage was more negative than Hillary Clinton's, but that suddenly turned around after James Comey's letter about Clinton's email was released. In the final two weeks of the campaign, more than a third of Clinton's coverage was devoted to scandals. At the same time, coverage of Trump turned suddenly less negative.

The result is that during the crucial closing stretch of the campaign, Clinton's coverage was more negative than Trump's. It's hard to look at this and not conclude that Comey's letter was the key turning point that made Donald Trump president.

There are lots of other interesting tidbits in the Shorenstein report, but this one in particular struck me:

That's an astonishingly straight line. For the past half century, news coverage of presidential campaigns has gotten steadily more negative—regardless of who's running. This is disturbing. It's easy to believe that the clubby and decorous political coverage of the 50s and 60s deserved to become tougher and more candid. But this doesn't mean that ever more cynical is the right answer. Does it really stand to reason that a full two-thirds of the coverage of the past three elections—featuring five different candidates—has been negative? I'm hard pressed to see how.

Also, note that 2016 did not generate the most negative coverage of all time. That honor still belongs to 2000. I'm pointing this out as bait for Bob Somerby.

We have another cabinet choice: Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt will lead the EPA. Pruitt is pretty much what you'd expect: he's a climate change skeptic and has led the charge against pretty much every Obama initiative to protect the environment. And he's from Oklahoma, so it's hardly surprising that he's cozy with the fossil fuel industry.

In a controversial decision, the judges here at blog headquarters have named Pruitt the first Trump nominee who's neither part of the swamp nor rich, crazy, or scary. Pruitt is a state official, so he's not part of the DC swamp. And his climate skepticism and hatred of all environmental rules is pretty mainstream for Republicans. That's scary, of course, but the title is reserved for those who are scary far beyond just being folks that liberals don't like.

This prompts a question: if you could wave a magic wand and dump either Steve Bannon or Michael Flynn from Trump's staff, which would you choose? I'd choose Flynn.

These charts are no longer useful to the deniers thanks to the very high temperatures of the past couple of years, so they've gone away. But what will take their place? I was amused to discover the answer a few days ago: 2016 doesn't mean anything because it was an El Niño year.

Hah! Nobody ever said they didn't have chutzpah. But it got me curious: what does a global temperature chart look like if you pull out just the El Niño and La Niña years? That seemed like a lot of work to get right, so I put it aside. Today, however, I found out that someone else had already done it for me. Here it is:

This comes from a Weather Channel piece titled "Note to Breitbart: Earth Is Not Cooling, Climate Change Is Real and Please Stop Using Our Video to Mislead Americans." The chart itself apparently comes from skepticalscience.com, but I can't figure out exactly where to link to it. [UPDATE: Here it is. It's an animated GIF!] However, it shows the historical data clearly: El Niño years (in red) are always hot, but have been getting steadily hotter. La Niña years (in blue) are always cool, but have also been getting steadily hotter. And the years in-between (in black) have been getting steadily hotter too. Long story short, every kind of year has been getting steadily hotter for a long time.

Both poles are showing massive ice loss compared to trend. We've never seen anything like it. You can draw all the misleading charts you want, but it doesn't change the facts. Climate change is real, and it's getting worse.

Retired Gen. Charles Dunlap says we shouldn't be too worried about all the generals that Donald Trump is picking for his cabinet:

Many in the civilian world misunderstand the ways most generals see the world....Retired generals don’t clamor for war; they are typically the voices urging that all other avenues be exhausted before turning to force.

As chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then-Army Gen. Colin Powell authored a thoughtful but tempered use-of-force doctrine that said America should only go to war with defined objectives and a clear exit strategy. It was designed to persuade civilian policymakers to be extremely cautious about ordering troops into battle. It didn’t work, and true “hawks” of Powell’s tenure often proved to be high-ranking civilian officials with liberal political leanings.

My sense is that this is true. But that doesn't mean it is, of course. Maybe my sense is wrong. I'd like to hear more about this from both civilian and military folks who have held high-ranking positions in previous administrations. When it comes to the use of force, are ex-generals generally voices of moderation?

The New York Times reports that Donald Trump plans to name Gen. John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, as Secretary of Homeland Security. That makes three generals so far in his cabinet: Flynn, Mattis,1 and Kelly. That's a lot of generals, no? Especially for a guy who trashed America's generals during the campaign because "they haven't done the job." I guess he changed his mind.

Over at Equitable Growth, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman provide a look at the latest numbers on income inequality in the United States:

The authors comment:

For the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth has been non-existent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been extraordinarily strong....In the bottom half of the distribution, only the income of the elderly is rising....To understand how unequal the United States is today, consider the following fact. In 1980, adults in the top 1 percent earned on average 27 times more than bottom 50 percent of adults. Today they earn 81 times more.

Well, that's the modern world for you, right? It's all about skills and education and greater returns to rock stars. There's really not much we can do about—oh wait. Here's another chart:

Huh. Apparently you can run a thriving modern economy that benefits the working class as well as the rich. And note that this is pre-tax income. If social welfare benefits were included, the working class in France would be doing even better compared to the US:

The diverging trends in the distribution of pre-tax income across France and the United States—two advanced economies subject to the same forces of technological progress and globalization—show that working-class incomes are not bound to stagnate in Western countries. In the United States, the stagnation of bottom 50 percent of incomes and the upsurge in the top 1 percent coincided with drastically reduced progressive taxation, widespread deregulation of industries and services, particularly the financial services industry, weakened unions, and an eroding minimum wage.

We could do better for the working class and still maintain our economic dynamism if we wanted to. The only thing stopping us is that, apparently, we1 don't want to.

I would like to bring your attention once again to the two stock charts below:

Last week, Trump took a baby step into the world of crony capitalism by bribing/threatening United Technologies to keep a Carrier plant in Indiana so that Trump would look good. Today, he took a big ol' dive into the crony capitalism pool, tanking one company's stock because they had displeased him, and boosting two others because an investor had agreed to say nice things about him.

Now, in both cases the effects were temporary. Still, is this going to be a regular thing? Are American equity markets now in thrall to the whims of Donald Trump? Do companies need to be fearful of what the president of the United States might do to them if he happens to take a dislike to something they do?

And while I know how annoying this question can be, can you even imagine how Republicans would react if Barack Obama pulled this kind of stunt? Fox News would practically explode and Jason Chaffetz would start gearing up for a year or two of hearings. But since it's Trump doing it, there's nothing but radio silence. Apparently government interference in the free market isn't quite so terrible after all.